Part II

Discovery

“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans.”

- Stephen Hawking

Chapter Eight

EXCERPT FROM “THE TERRY SMYTH SHOW”, DIS-FOX CHANNEL, 2320-07-21

“...and now let’s hear your take on the issue, Dr. Patel,” said the talk show host, turning to a man dressed in the obligatory lab coat.

“CRISPR-3 is a breakthrough in gene editing, finally realizing the century-old promise of personalized medicine. Imagine going to the doctor and getting treated for cancer and genetic disorders, with a treatment that suits you exactly, with no side effects! The FDA approval of the new gene therapy techniques will usher in a new era of medical miracles.”

“What about critics who claim this will simply be another thing between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’, and their worries about the so-called ‘designer babies’?”

Dr. Patel visibly scoffed at the notion. “That has been outlawed in almost every nation on Earth, and the few that haven’t are third-world warzones. That issue was put to bed decades ago.”

“Careful,” I warned.

“I’m being careful,” said Sakura.

“Watch the corner,” said Agrippa.

“I am literally watching all the same cameras you two are,” said Sakura testily. “And I can split my focus twenty-nine times over. Neither of you can do that, which is why I’m moving this, and you aren’t.”

The alien fusion plant was being carefully moved into one of the chambers near HQ. It had sat on the surface for months as we disassembled the ship piece by piece and carted it into the chamber we’d designated the ‘alien room’. The process was slow. I’d carefully documented each and every bolt, panel and wire as we dissected the only piece of technology we had. The blank storage units were disassembled in my lab, but I had stalled on figuring out how to read them. We had no manuals and no secret alien technology libraries. The fuel tanks had been carefully drained of deuterium and tritium, every erg of power had been allowed to ground out, and there was no possible way for the fusion reactor to activate. I had deemed it safe to move the reactor, which would finally allow us to get to the engine pods slung underneath it.

Up on the surface, we’d stripped every last alien artifact we could find. We’d salvaged alien foodstocks, tools, gear, entertainment equipment, personal effects, electronics of many varieties, the lasers that had defended the craft, and anything even vaguely resembling something useful. We’d even stripped away the vacuum suits from the dead aliens for analysis, and put the dead bodies in cold storage. Then I had the craft cut apart by welder wielding drones, for what was left was simple metal, except for the engines and fusion reactor.

“How are the LM3 transports working, Sakura?” I asked.

“Like a dream,” she said. “The impulse engines make moving a lot easier. Treads are great for heavy work, but for precision maneuvering, being able to hover makes it a lot easier.”

“Good thing you got that factory online,” said Agrippa. “We’re going to need it.”

“I know, Agrippa, I know. I promise, we’ll finalize the timetables for combat drones. Your hangar is nearly dug out.”

“First hangar,” he corrected. “We’ll need a lot of drones to build an effective defense.”

“Right,” said Sakura. She carefully guided the fusion reactor into a corner of the storage chamber, or as she had dubbed it, “the Alien Room”. The room had been broken up with large shelves extending to the ceiling, with ramps and walkways allowing access to the upper shelves. One corner of the room was bare of shelves, leaving room for the reactor and the engine pods.

Following right behind the fusion reactor was a small train of transports carrying the engine pods. Each pod was identical, and had been slung beneath the fusion reactor in a way that had made it very difficult for the drones capable of surface movement to access, so we’d not been able to even peek inside until now. If I had actually gone to the surface, my android body could have fit into the access hatches that the alien mining crew had used, but the narrow hatches had been too tight for even the smallest drones that we could use up top.

Fortunately enough, we were able to remove enough floor panels to disassemble the wiring, and had simply cut the exterior housing until we could separate the pods for transport. I was itching to get into them, for they had no visible exhaust ports. I theorized that they were using a variation of the reactionless thrust that I used for my drones. The impulse engines we used relied on the Mach effect and crazy amounts of power, but the thrust was insufficient to compare against traditional reaction-based thrusters. While you could use it as thrust in space, an impulse engine would be extremely inefficient when you looked at the energy requirements versus the thrust generated. There was a reason I only used the impulse engines on drones that needed to work in low- to no- gravity areas.

“So the industrial ceramics and advanced polymer factories are online,” said Sakura conversationally as the delicate ballet of moving drones continued. “We can start assembling advanced cortex units. It would be hand assembly for now, unless you want to design an assembly factory to mass produce them.”

“She doesn’t have time for that,” interjected Agrippa. “She already needs to finalize assault drone designs, defensive installations, and coilgun assembly.”

“The micro-reactor testing finished a month ago. She still owes me project planning for the distributed power grid redesign, the transport rail network, and general-purpose worker droids.”

I shook my head. That only scratched the surface. I also needed to finish the hydroponics factory design so that Sakura could start producing equipment for a greenhouse, ammunition fabricators and ammo tanks to feed the coilguns, and I really wanted to work on the Mark-III android bodies. The Mark-II prototype was sitting in my lab on a bench, mostly disassembled for conversion to Mark-III. I’d made it with a biopolymer skin over synthetic musculature. It lost a bit in strength, but gained in facial expressions, flexibility in movement, and had a better internal design for the cortex and internal memory and data storage. Unfortunately, it was a bit too human looking. Apparently, NI intelligences were every bit as creeped out by the Uncanny Valley as humans had been. The creepy face was too much for any of us.

On top of all that, I was still buried in reverse engineering the alien tech we’d recovered. I’d made exactly zero progress in understanding their storage architecture despite my education and the complete knowledge of humanity’s techbase. I’d had a lot more luck with the rest of their technology, as it wasn’t too far different from what we used. Sadly, I was finding that in most ways, we were technologically equivalent, or in some cases, better. I did get some improved designs for processing and memory, but that was a marginal improvement, and did little to shed light on the aliens.

“Have you decided on integrating NI-5 cortex units into the military drones?” asked Agrippa.

“I have,” I replied. “I’m going to allow several test units to be brought online, to be tested for stability. We don’t have the time or the manpower to code custom military algorithms, and we need some governing intelligence for the units, anyway. It’s too much work to create semi-autonomous units and then have you or other NI-15 units micromanage.”

“I think you’re overloaded again,” said Sakura. The transports were gently setting down the fusion reactor in the corner. They’d have to exit the opposite door in the chamber, as the transports with the engine pods were right behind them. “You should bring another NI online.”

She wasn’t wrong. I’d offloaded a lot of work to Agrippa and Sakura. Agrippa was spending his free time studying and planning a greenhouse, and eventually, a biodome. On top of that, he was working with me to adapt Earth-style assault craft for use as space-based defense drones, and the basic Boston Dynamics android templates for internal security. Sakura was managing over a million square meters of factories, fabrication plants, refineries, and repair facilities. She had not been slow to install NI-5 cortex units in every factory that could use one, affectionately calling them her “dwarves”. I think she meant Lord of the Rings dwarves as opposed to Disney dwarves, but I wasn’t certain. On top of that, I’d brought a new datacenter online, which had increased her ability to multitask.

Despite all that, simple design work alone ate up most of my time. I still had to manage the data center design and implementation, research and development, reverse engineering of alien craft, growth planning, and a thousand other big-picture plans. We were all working 24/7, which meant Agrippa and I were easily doing the work of four or five dedicated humans each, while Sakura was doing the work of dozens. I envied her ability to split her focus in twenty-nine directions, but I had not been purpose-built to do that, and would never be able to do so. Agrippa was optimized in a different direction, and was not able to utilize most of that without the infrastructure, weapons and craft necessary. I mentally moved Mark-III to the top of my list. We needed more help, and I was already stalled on the alien tech.

The transports for the engine pods were now doing their delicate dance to set down their cargo without damaging it. It was almost artful how they moved. Sakura was directly controlling them rather than allowing their internal controllers do the work. Each engine pod was using two transports to carry the pod, and a second pair to stabilize the load during the trip. Now the top pair was carefully holding the engine pod so that the bottom pair could slide out, allowing the pod to gently drop to the surface.

A muffled crump came from the Alien Room. Great, she had me calling it that, too. There was practically no atmosphere here, just a few escaped gases from the refineries hundreds of meters away. We had sealed away our advanced manufacturing and data centers behind airlocks and heavy-duty filtration systems, and our data center designs still relied on an artificial atmosphere behind their own blast doors to facilitate cooling. But our HQ zone was not sequestered, so theoretically, sound could carry if it was loud enough. I had felt the vibrations through the very walls, however, making the sensors in my torso light off. I immediately fired up the cameras.

In the Alien Room, the four transports that had been setting the engine pod on the floor were crushed and flattened. Well, not all of them. One of the drones was sliced clean in half, with one half crushed and the other half looking untouched. The engine pod was laying sideways on the floor, dented but otherwise fine.

“Umm, what just happened?” I asked.

I was hiding in the tree in my backyard. I’d spent a lot of time climbing this tree, but lately I’d been using it as a hiding spot to avoid her. She was always so angry, and I didn’t know what happened. All I’d said was that I thought women were prettier than men. Then she started yelling about how I should worry more about getting a good husband than I did about wasting my time doing math. It was so confusing. My teacher said we needed to be good at multiplying and dividing fractions so we could do well in middle school.

“Honey? You up there?” I heard my father’s voice at the bottom of the tree, even though I couldn’t see him. I thought about not saying anything, but I really wanted a hug.

“I’m here,” I said softly. I wasn’t sure he’d heard me, but then I felt the slight sway of the tree as he began to climb up. It took him only a minute to settle onto the branch next to mine, facing me.

“Why is Mommy so mad about my test?” I asked.

“Oh, pumpkin,” he said, pulling me over to him. It was an awkward embrace until I slipped from my branch to his lap. He was big and comforting. “You are brilliant at math, and I am so very proud of you.”

His words warmed me, and I leaned into him. He kept speaking. “Your Mommy found new friends at her church that are a lot like the ones at her father’s church. I don’t agree with what they say, but your Mommy does. I think they’re a bad influence.”

I nodded into his chest, my face still pressed against him. He’d told me about bad influences before. That mean girl at school was a bad influence, she was always getting into trouble.

“Is that why we stay home with you instead of going to church with Mommy?” I asked.

“That’s part of it,” he said. “I want you to learn and grow the way that works for you. I’m going to stay with you and help you, even if that means I might have to get into fights with Mommy. You just keep up the good work in school. Understand?”

I didn’t understand, even a little bit. I nodded anyway. I was hungry. “Can I have a snack?”

He laughed. “Sure, pumpkin. Let’s get you a snack.”

“It was an exposed wire on the transport,” said Sakura. She’d been investigating for several hours now. “The cargo arm that was moving the engine pod escaped the… whatever it was… and was laying on the ground by the pod. I think it pushed current into the engine pod, and it partially activated for a brief second.”

“So the engine pod did this,” I said. That was fascinating. For the first time since we started working on the alien craft, this was an advance that was significantly different from what we already knew. Everything else was underwhelmingly ordinary. Their computer tech was slightly more efficient than our own, although we still didn’t understand their storage architecture. I suspected, however, that it was different rather than better. I also suspected that their reactor was going to be a variation on what we already understood. With any luck, we might find a more efficient design for when we started producing our own new micro-reactors. But this looked like it might be a breakthrough in engine design.

One of the biggest hurdles of space travel was the balance between speed, fuel and cargo. If you have a lot of cargo mass, the speed you can achieve with the fuel you carry is limited. If you carry more fuel, you can increase your range or you can increase your speed, but at the expense of cargo mass. The only way to “shortcut” this essential balance is to improve the efficiency of acceleration to fuel consumption. If you can burn less fuel to get more acceleration, you can fundamentally alter your ratios of engine to fuel to cargo.

The alien craft was oriented towards short-haul operation. I had no way of knowing how much food and water the aliens required on a daily basis. However, there was no hydroponics or food production onboard. Assuming similar consumption rates to human males at around 2,100 to 2,500 calories a day, and looking at how many empty food containers they had stored as trash, they had planned for a total trip time of three to four months.

That only made sense in two scenarios. The first scenario is that the engine pods sitting in our storage area was capable of phenomenal thrusts or relied on scientific principles we simply didn’t know or understand. This would allow the aliens to travel for a month or two, stay at their destination for a short period, then travel back. I had a hard time believing that they had some magic tech that made this scenario feasible.

The second scenario was potentially far scarier for us, and the more likely. This was probably a satellite ship of some sort. There was a larger ship that this one would dock to, or sit inside of, for the larger, longer trip between stars. As a designer, I could see the benefits of having a big mothership with a huge engine and massive fuel reserves, but having smaller ships to tool around a single star system.

“100,000! Woohoo!” came Sakura’s excited cry over the radio. Sometimes, keeping up with Sakura’s current train of thought could be dizzying, seeing as she had twenty-nine of them at the same time. I’d asked her about it once, and she’d described it as having a central thought process, with different focuses branching off and running semi-independently while also periodically synching back with the central process. Her central process was focused on managing and integrating all of her sub-processes. In practice, that meant that she leapt from focus to focus at dizzy speeds as they integrated back in. It sounded terribly confusing to me, and often meant she made topic changes at the drop of a hat. Seeing as it worked, however, I wasn’t going to complain.

“100,000 of what?” I asked.

“Drones! We’re up to 100,000 drones! I just rolled number 100,000 off the production line. Technically, we passed 100,000 awhile ago, but I’ve been scrapping obsolete and inefficient drones as soon as their replacements were in service. We plateaued for about eleven days.”

“What does that mean in practical terms?” I asked.

“In practical terms, it means I’m digging out entire zones of nine chambers each in a few hours now. I can bring new factories online in days, and integrate them into our production processes within days of certification. I’m adding dozens of new NI-5’s in factories every day to further optimize production.”

“If you’re doing that well, when can I get my assault drones in production?” asked Agrippa, not unreasonably.

“The first internal security drones will be finished by the end of the day. Geez, you know how to spoil a surprise,” grumbled Sakura. “I have facilities ready for the assault drones to start as soon as you and Nikola finalize the design.”

“Nikola?” asked Agrippa. He didn’t even have to finish that thought. In that instant, Mark-III became priority number two. Of the two scenarios, I felt scenario two was the most likely. I’d hash it out with Agrippa later, but I knew what he was going to say. It was better to plan for the worst.

“As soon as we’re done with analyzing what happened in the Alien Room, let’s work on it. I also want to finalize our coil gun emplacements and the ammo tank design.”

“About that… you might want to replay the video feed of the incident,” said Agrippa. “At quarter-speed.”

I did as he asked, loading up the video and playing it in slow motion. I saw the spark from the transport arm as it touched inside the pod. The arm had been holding a brace inside the pod to carry the partly disassembled engine. The spark arced into the engine and a flash of blue light pulsed from inside the alien artifact. In that moment, I could see a faint distortion as a field of some sort flashed on and back off again. At the same time, the four transports were pushed a full meter higher than they had been floating, before an invisible hand crushed them down into the ten-meter-thick steel floor.

“That… looks like gravity manipulation,” said Sakura, clearly looking at the same feed as I was. “How did I miss that?”

“You were looking for a cause,” said Agrippa. “I was looking for a weapon.”

A weapon? I mentally shook my head. This wasn’t a weapon, it was a malfunctioning engine. This was a powerful reactionless thrust mechanism. The aliens had figured out how to ‘cheat’ the engine to fuel to cargo balance. A single fusion engine being able to push a craft that easily had triple the cargo mass, for several months, could be a game changer for us. We needed to figure out this technology, and fast.